(Original headline: X Prize hype: Hope or hoax? )
"The X-PRIZE is nothing but a big hoax. I think hoax means a lie, doesn’t it?" Fred Wilcoxson says.
Wilcoxson, 82, a retired Holloman Air Force Base airplane mechanic, has long been critical of American governmental “secrecy” he says is crippling the economy. There are other ramifications because of the secrecy, he says, which include denying today’s youth tomorrow’s opportunities in space and needless deaths from worn-out technology.
The X-PRIZE is an effort to commercialize space through private enterprise, and is expected to bring millions to southern New Mexico’s economies over the coming years. Wilcoxson, though, claims the X-PRIZE is a “hoax” because anti-gravity technology — which negates expensive rocketry — has been usable since the 1920s.
“Anti-gravity is the clue to space travel, it’s the clue to space commercialization and yet you never hear it mentioned. It was missing from Apollo, it was missing from all the NASA programs,” Wilcoxson says. “If you take (out) anti-gravity you don’t have a space program. Those anti-gravity (craft), or what UFOs as they are well known, some of them weigh 30 tons. But if you overcome gravity you could lift it with your little finger.”
That the Air Force and NASA continue using rocketry wastes billions of taxpayer dollars, according to Wilcoxson. He says the space shuttle astronauts who were killed would not have died if the government had not kept a cloak of secrecy around anti-gravity.
“The first successful flights of anti-gravity took place in about 1932,” Wilcoxson claims. “One could have been here. A friend of mine told me it was in 1932 that he saw this bright light out west go from the ground up and he was a guard on the lumber mill at the time.”
Subsequently, Wilcoxson says the military established a UFO base at Orogrande in 1941 to test their newly built craft. The infamous Roswell UFO craft that crashed might well have originated there, he believes.
In the mid-1940s, Wilcoxson joined the Army Air Corps.
He moved to Roswell not long after the 1947 crash.
Like countless other people, Wilcoxson says for two decades he bought into the UFO “hype” that aliens had arrived on planet Earth.
Until, that is, in 1966 when he was vacationing at Halls Crossing, Lake Powell, Utah. Wilcoxson sighted UFOs.
The craft, he says, were flying in Air Force formation: a lead ship with others following to either side in a swept-wing formation. At that moment he says he realized that if they were extra-terrestrial they would not be traveling that in that manner.
“Maybe the crash wasn’t alien,” Wilcoxson said he realized of Roswell. “You’re getting down into the military, where the military operates, so you can put two and two together.”
He cites other dates he says are key to the alleged secrecy.
“(The year) 1953 was ... important because the CIA formed the Robertson Panel. They were going to discuss whether or not UFOs existed,” Wilcoxson says. “(President) Truman suggested to the CIA to investigate those UFOs,” Wilcoxson says. “The CIA convened the Robertson Panel, which was a bunch of bunk.”
The group was officially known as the “Office of Scientific Intelligence Advisory Panel On Unidentified Flying Objects.” The Web site parascope.com states the group was created when “the CIA’s science officials had resolved to form an expert panel to come up with police recommendations on how to minimize public concern about UFOs and prevent panic during large national flaps.”
They determined any “threat posed by UFOs to national security was psychological rather than physical,” the site states.
About the same time, Wilcoxson says, the United States established moon bases to mine the resources.
“We have never left the moon. Never, never, never. We were on the moon in the early ’50s and are still there,” he says.
So why continue to perpetrate fraud? From Wilcoxson’s point of view, thousands of jobs would instantly go away if rocketry-based science were to end.
“They’re after your money,” Wilcoxson says. “We’re also misleading the kids. Why don’t we tell (the students) the truth?”
Not doing so, he says, limits their future employment opportunities, which he believes will greatly expand to make up for the end of the rocket era. If not, Wilcoxson believes when the secret house of cards comes tumbling down, industry built on the lie will crash and the economy will follow. He points out that Alamogordo is highly dependent upon Holloman and the F-117A Nighthawk stealth fighters.
The latest event he characterizes as propping up the house of cards is X-PRIZE, which he insists was “instigated by NASA” to push the “hoax” along.
“They had professional hypers. That show was quite well organized. It wasn’t for the good of southern New Mexico. It wasn’t to benefit space travel. It was a well put-on sideshow,” Wilcoxson says. “It all stinks.”
